The real story in McKinsey’s State of Marketing 2026 is not the charts. It is the confession. Europe’s marketing engines were built for a world that no longer exists.
Budgets rise yet impact stalls. Data grows yet decision quality lags. AI expands yet teams operate with twentieth century structures.
The winners share one pattern. They stop treating marketing as a function and start running it as an adaptive system. • Cross functional squads instead of siloed departments • Always on experimentation instead of quarterly bursts • First party data as an asset not a compliance chore • Creative bravery tied directly to commercial impact
This shift is not cosmetic. It is existential. The report shows that firms who redesign around this model create disproportionate growth even in flat markets. Europe’s marketers face a simple question. Keep optimising the old machine or build the one that fits reality.
If your organisation feels stuck, this is the moment to redesign not repackage. The companies that act now will define the next decade of European marketing.
If you want communication that earns belief, not just attention, start a conversation with me.
Innovation always arrives with the confidence of inevitability. Advertising embraced every wave, convinced that more data, better targeting and new tools would sharpen persuasion and elevate the craft. Instead, something stranger happened. The technology advanced. The imagination retreated. With every breakthrough, the work felt a little smaller.
For two decades, the industry treated innovation as progress. Programmatic promised efficiency. Personalisation promised relevance. Social platforms promised connection. AI now promises creativity at scale. Yet each leap brought an unintended consequence: the slow erosion of the qualities that once made persuasion work at all. Automation delivered reach but drained attention. Personalisation increased precision but produced uniformity. Infinite content created abundance but flattened originality.
The turning point came when advertising stopped paying for attention and started paying for access. Once platforms controlled distribution, the purpose of advertising shifted. Its job was no longer to persuade a human being. Its job was to feed a machine.
In that moment, creativity ceased to be a competitive advantage and became a variable in an optimisation loop. Innovation didn’t accelerate originality. It standardised it. In a system calibrated for predictable performance, surprise becomes a liability and replication becomes the path of least resistance.
Economic incentives deepened the problem. Platforms captured distribution, data and value. Agencies adapted by serving the metrics that platforms dictated. Clients, pressured by volatility, demanded certainty and measurable outcomes. Creativity became something to justify rather than something to pursue. The work bent itself around what could be tracked, not what could be felt. The industry once prized ideas that lived in culture. It now mass-produces content that survives in a feed.
Behaviourally, the consequences are severe. Humans respond to tension, novelty and the unexpected. Algorithms reward what has performed before. When a system selects for the familiar, it punishes the original. Advertising shifted from making meaning to manufacturing micro-interactions that register as activity but rarely accumulate as persuasion. The ambition of the work shrank to match the duration of a swipe.
Culturally, infinite content did not expand possibility. It converged it. Templates spread faster than ideas. Trends collapsed into hours. Brands that once shaped culture now orbit the same reference points, moving in sync with the same logic of the platforms they depend on. In a landscape where anything can be produced instantly, almost nothing feels crafted.
AI arrives as the next accelerant. It offers astonishing ease but amplifies the worst instincts of the existing system: speed over substance, scale over intention and optimisation over imagination. If deployed within the same incentive architecture, it will not revive the craft. It will accelerate its dissolution. The industry will not drown in bad ideas. It will drown in endless competent ones.
The uncomfortable truth is that advertising did not decline because innovation failed. It declined because innovation succeeded in a system that rewarded efficiency, predictability and standardisation. It became frictionless. It became measurable. It became scalable. But persuasion has never been any of those things. Persuasion is human, slow, emotional and fundamentally resistant to automation. When everything becomes efficient, nothing feels meaningful.
Advertising used to be a cultural force. It did not have to lose its soul. It simply entered an economy designed to value access over attention, repetition over originality and metrics over meaning.
Once the platforms became the intermediaries, the outcome was not just predictable but unavoidable. Justifying it was easy: the audience had moved, and the click-through rates looked reassuring. But numbers can rise even as the work diminishes.
It is a bleak irony that one of the world’s most inventive creative industries lost so much of its creative inventiveness in the name of progress
For consumers Decision fatigue disappears. You describe your needs and get a personalised buyer’s guide that filters, compares, and questions on your behalf. Shopping becomes clarity, not chaos.
For marketers The era of “more content” is over. If an agent interprets your brand, only the clearest value, strongest proof, and simplest differentiation survive. Messaging needs to be honest, sharp, and immediately legible to an AI interpreter.
For e-shops Your real competitor isn’t the store next door. It’s the agent that chooses whether your product even appears in the shortlist. UX matters less. Truth, pricing, and trust signals matter more, than internal teams selling your products on youtube channel and tiktok A new layer has entered the funnel: the AI researcher. Whoever understands this first wins 2026.
For influencers Your relevance depends on what part of your influence was real. The “I test products so you don’t have to” model becomes replaceable and obsolete. An agent can do that faster, deeper, cheaper and without bias. What survives is the part no machine can imitate: your worldview, your cultural voice, your ability to create identity and belonging (if you have one) Product curators fade. Meaning-makers rise.
Once upon a time well a few yeas back to be precise, advertising agencies were factories. You gave them a brief, they churned out scripts, visuals, jingles. The cost was in the craft—the lights, the cameras, the battalions of account execs and creatives.
But then along came AI. Suddenly, everyone had a factory in their laptop. Need a video? Done in an afternoon. A headline? Five seconds. A hundred variations of a TikTok spot? Press a button.
Which leaves us with an awkward question: if anyone can make an ad, why pay an agency to make one?
The reflex answer “better craft” no longer holds. Craft is now abundant, instant, nearly free. The moat is gone. The castle is empty.
So where’s the new scarcity? It’s not in making. I believe that it is in choosing.
Taste. Strategy. Judgment. Signal from noise.
That is the agency’s future. Not as a factory, but as a curator.
Think of it this way: AI can give you 100 ads before lunch. Ninety-eight will be irrelevant. Two might be brilliant. The in-house client team will likely pick the wrong ninety-eight. Why? Because brands rarely see themselves clearly. They’re too close to the mirror.
Agencies, at their best, are editors of culture. They know which tensions to enter, which signals to amplify, which executions deserve media money and which deserve a swift burial.
This changes the economic model, too. Agencies shouldn’t sell hours or outputs. They should sell discernment. Maybe it’s a subscription to cultural intelligence. Maybe it’s royalties on ideas that go viral. Maybe it’s performance fees. But the days of charging for bulk production are numbered.
The factory is dying. And good riddance.
The curator is rising. Agencies that embrace this with the right talent will thrive, not by producing more content, but by ruthlessly deciding what deserves to exist.
Because in a world drowning in infinite bad irrelevant ads, the bravest act isn’t making another one. It’s having the taste, courage, and foresight to say: No. That doesn’t cut through. Kill it.
So here’s the final provocation: Do you want to be remembered as the brand that produced ads, or the one that edited culture?
Advertising once worked like a well-planned dinner party. The strategist decided the seating plan, the topics of conversation, and when to change the subject. The creative lit the candles, poured the wine, and told the story that made the whole evening worth remembering.
Now the party has collapsed into chaos. The strategist is in the kitchen fiddling with soufflés. The creative is scribbling seating plans on napkins. And the machine, our shiny new sous-chef, has prepared twenty main courses at once, none of which anybody particularly wants to eat.
It looks lively. In truth it is cannibalism. Everyone is trespassing into everyone else’s garden. And when everyone does everything, nobody does anything well.
The strategist loses the depth of thinking that once made them valuable. The creative loses the craft that once made them indispensable. And the idea, the very heartbeat of advertising, is left without a clear owner.
The Result of the Collapse
For Agencies Agencies now resemble karaoke bars. Everyone is singing, but the tune is borrowed and the lyrics are hollow. The flood of AI-generated mockups dazzles in pitch rooms but collapses in the real world. Timelines do not accelerate because of efficiency but because confusion creates the illusion of speed.
Without role clarity, agencies drift into performance theatre. They produce mountains of content but little of it connects. They mistake volume for value. And as they try to be everything at once, they slowly become nothing in particular.
For Clients Clients are promised brilliance but delivered decoration. They receive work that looks like advertising but lacks the spine of strategy and the soul of creativity. They are drowned in outputs yet starved of ideas.
This confusion erodes trust. Clients cannot tell who to hold accountable. Was it the strategist, the creative, or the tool? In the absence of ownership, everything feels disposable. The brand pays the price in irrelevance, sameness, and wasted budgets.
Sooner or later, clients will stop seeing agencies as partners in meaning and memory. They will treat them as suppliers of cheap, forgettable content. Once you become a supplier instead of a partner, the game is already lost.
The Mirage of AI
The industry loves to blame AI. But AI did not kill creativity. It simply handed us a mirror.
AI is not the executioner. It is the accomplice. It exposes our professional insecurities with embarrassing clarity.
Strategists, anxious about irrelevance, spend hours fiddling with Midjourney prompts, writing their own scripts and slogans and call it “ideation.” Creatives, equally anxious, hide behind pseudo-intellectual decks and sprinkle jargon about “cultural tension” like salt on a bland meal. The machine obligingly produces endless outputs. All style, no spine.
The real problem is not the tool but the abdication of responsibility.
We have built an illusion of abundance. Agencies flaunt hundreds of mockups as though volume equals value. Clients nod approvingly, dazzled by the spectacle, only to wonder six months later why nothing shifted in the market. It is like serving twenty desserts while forgetting the main course.
Here lies the paradox. AI makes it easier than ever to generate what something might look like. But it does nothing to answer why it should exist at all. Without the “why,” the “what” is nothing more than decoration.
Once you mistake decoration for strategy, you are no longer an agency. You are a content farm with better lighting.
Who Owns the Idea?
This is the question we dare not ask. Who owns the idea now?
The Strategist Knows the market, the culture, the numbers. Can explain why something matters. But too often delivers skeletons without flesh.
The Creative Knows craft, taste, instinct. Can make an idea sing. But without direction risks producing viral fluff shareable, forgettable, meaningless.
The Machine Generates speed, scale, and surprise. Produces endless options in seconds. But cannot decide meaning. It has no skin in the game.
Today everyone points at everyone else, and the idea becomes orphaned. Nobody claims it, nobody defends it. And if nobody owns the idea, then nobody owns the outcome.
The Missing Role
What agencies need is not blurred roles but sharper ones. Someone must guard the idea. Someone must hold the “why” steady while the “how” evolves. Call them strategist, call them creative, call them lunatic it does not matter. But without a custodian of meaning, the machine will multiply nothing into infinity.
The great irony is that advertising was always about ownership. Someone had to stand in the room and say, “This is the idea. This is what we believe.” Without that moment, there is no risk, no courage, and no chance of resonance.
The danger of AI is not that it replaces us.
The danger is that it tempts us to replace ourselves. We confuse output for ideas, iteration for invention, role-swapping for collaboration.
We tell ourselves that cost-cutting justifies confusion. That speed justifies shallowness. That abundance justifies emptiness.
But every brand is built on memory, meaning, and commitment. And memory, meaning, and commitment do not emerge from machines. They come from people willing to own ideas.
So the question remains. Should we really let this continue just because it cuts costs?
The supermarket is one of the strangest and most powerful inventions in human history. Grocery shopping is often perceived as a simple, mundane activity. And for many, access to food has never been more effortless. But supermarkets hold far more power than we realize. The journey our groceries take to reach the shelves touches every part of our lives – from our health, to our culture, to the environment.
